Saturday, January 19, 2013

If the gun advocates behind this year’s inaugural Gun Appreciation
Day had hoped to use the day’s festivities to build support for their
anti-regulation platform, they are going to have to wait another year.

Emergency personnel had to be called to the scene of the Dixie Gun
and Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina after a gun accidentally
discharged and shot two people
at the show’s safety check-in booth just after 1 pm. Both victims were
transported to an area hospital, and the Raleigh Fire Department
announced that the show would be closed for the rest of the day.

Responsible!

Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the
Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at
the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC
affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says
that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his
gun in the show parking lot. That brings the tally to 4 victims of gun
violence so far at three different gun shows during the country’s first
Gun Appreciation Day.

Super responsible!

CNN is reporting
that three people were injured at the gun show in Raleigh, not two as
originally reported. All were victims of a shotgun that fired while the
owner was removing it from a case.

Big news. Eric Cantor has just made it official: The GOP leadership
is prepared to agree to a three month debt ceiling hike. This is a major
de-escalation of the crazy and effectively means Republicans have all
but taken the threat of default off the table completely.

We must pay our bills and responsibly budget for our
future. Next week, we will authorize a three month temporary debt limit
increase to give the Senate and House time to pass a budget.
Furthermore, if the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time,
Members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing
to do their job. No budget, no pay.

Here’s why this matters: This increases the debt ceiling to authorize
borrowing to pay the country’s bills well into April. That punts the
debt limit deadline until after the deadline for funding for the
government to run out, which is on March 27th.
In other words, Republicans will now use the threat of a government
shutdown along with the coming expiration of the sequester to extract
the spending cuts it wants. Presuming this all gets resolved by then, or
soon after, it means the threat of default is no longer a factor. This
will all but certainly get resolved in advance of this three month
deadline, and a long term debt limit hike will get attached to that
agreement.

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. I thought that by ruling out any way to
bypass the debt limit, the White House was setting itself up, at least
potentially, for an ignominious cave-in. But it appears that the
strategy has worked, and it’s the Republicans giving up. I’m happy to concede that the president and team called this one right.

Yeah, well, us amateur pundits kinda knew this was going to happen.

The key point to remember here is that Obama achieves his main goals
simply by surviving. Above all, health reform gets implemented, and
probably becomes irreversible.

Also, sorry for the lack of posts last night. I had to replace a hard drive that melted down and restore data from my weekly backups. That took most of last night and this morning. I'm back now, and I'm sure you're all just thrilled.

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About ZVTS

With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and President Obama coming to the end of his second term in the White House, there's still plenty of Stupid to fight on all sides with a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, two seemingly endless wars, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there still coming from both political parties, when we need solutions.

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